Author: Andrew Huey

weekend weirdness

My iBook stopped working on Saturday. I brought it to the Genius Bar at the local Apple Store, and they managed to get it back up and running again. For a little while there, though, I thought I was going to have to trash it and buy a new MacBook. I’m planning on doing that at some point next year; I’m glad I didn’t wind up having to do it today. Right now, I’m doing a full backup with Retrospect, just in case.

I found out that Citibank canceled my credit card today and issued me a new one. I discovered this by trying to log on to my account on the web, and getting a big red error message about how my account was locked due to a security problem of some kind. I called them to ask what was going on, and they told me that they’d canceled the card due to the TJ Maxx security breach that happened a while back. Now, I can’t access my account online until I get a new card in the mail (hopefully, early next week). And I’m going to have to change my card number with every merchant that has it on file — Amazon, eBay, and so on. Fun.

Life on Mars playlist

Life on Mars is a great little show on the BBC. I think season two is supposed to air on BBC America soon. They use a lot of great old 70s rock on the show, so, since I’ve been messing around with iMixes, I decided to try and create an iMix with all the music from season one. I used the episode guide on the BBC site to get the names of all the songs they used — there’s about 50 songs, over just eight episodes. Some are well-known, like “Baba O’Riley” and “White Room”, some are a bit more obscure. I managed to create an iMix with 45 of the songs. Here it is:

(Or rather, here it was. Embedding iTunes mixes doesn’t seem to work anymore.)

I only had about 5 of these songs in my collection already. I used up the last of my iTunes credit to buy a few more of them, and I’ll probably buy the rest by cashing in some American Express points for a new iTunes credit.

Listening to some of this stuff, I’ve definitely gained some new respect for bands like Thin Lizzy, T-Rex, and Deep Purple. Go ahead, laugh all you want, but this stuff is fun to listen to!

Intelligent Life playlist

Intelligent Life is a pretty interesting new web site, apparently affiliated with The Economist. They’ve posted an iMix playlist with some good stuff on it. I was looking for some random songs to download from iTunes this week. Convenient!

…and I’ve now made an iMix for this on the iTunes US site, since the other guy’s iMix was on the UK site only. Here it is:
(Or rather was. iTunes mix embedding doesn’t seem to work anymore.)

keyboard macros

I’ve been using WinKey to manage system-wide keyboard macros on my Windows XP machines for awhile now. WinKey is a nice little program that simply allows you to launch programs by pressing a key combo involving the Windows key. I use Win-X to launch Firefox, for instance. I’ve had this running on all my home and work computers for the last several years, so I’ve really got these macros hard-wired into my brain at this point.

Unfortunately, WinKey doesn’t work on Vista (at least *I* can’t get it working), and is no longer being developed or supported by Copernic, the company that (at one point) wound up with the rights to it. (They didn’t develop it originally, but I don’t remember who did.)

I recently came across a program called AutoHotKey, which is a fairly powerful scripting environment for Windows keystroke macros and general automation. It *does* indeed work on Vista, and is being actively developed. And it’s open source! You do need to read at least a little bit of the documentation to get it to do what you want, but it’s not hard to figure out. For instance, this command:
#x::Run C:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxfirefox.exe
maps Win-x to launch Firefox.
And you can send keystrokes to the active window quite easily, so, for instance, this little script:
#+T::
FormatTime, CurrentDateTime,, MM/dd/yyyy h:mm tt
SendInput %CurrentDateTime%
return
pastes the current date and time into whatever app you’re currently using when you press Win-Shift-T.
You can just put all your little macros together in one text file, and put a shortcut to it in your StartUp group, and off you go. Neat!

I’ve been thinking about keyboard macros on the Mac, too. David Pogue did a column on PC and Mac macro programs a couple of weeks ago. There are a few interesting options on the Mac, but I haven’t had time to try any of them out yet.

cleaning stuff up

I’m getting over a cold right now, so I’ve stayed in all day, watching college football, and working on various things around the house. Once again, I found myself about 6 months behind in entering my Merrill Lynch statements into Quicken, so I took care of that. And, I did another round of going through old papers, shredding old receipts and filing some stuff I wanted to keep. I found a bunch of stuff from my fraternity, Alpha Phi Omega, including my “plausible deniability award” (don’t ask).

I also found receipts from the first two PC-compatible machines I owned. The first was an Amstrad PPC-640. (Check that web link. I’d forgotten that I could power it with ten D cells! Try that with your MacBook Pro! And, yes, it was a 22 lb portable!) The second was a fairly vanilla 286 Wang. (Alas, I can’t find a picture of that one on the internet.)

And I found some receipts related to my Amiga 500, though I didn’t find the receipt for the machine itself.

Office 2007

I finally got around to installing Office 2007 on my desktop computer today, only about 7 months after I bought it. I installed it on my Vista laptop a while ago, but I just hadn’t gotten around to doing it on the desktop XP machine. It seems to have upgraded Outlook fine, without screwing up my mail file in any way. I guess that’s the thing I was most afraid of: losing all my e-mail. And it doesn’t seem to be significantly slower than Outlook 2003, which is something else I was afraid of.

post 1001 – inbox zero

When I left work today, I’d gotten down to about 10 messages in my Notes inbox. Everything else was filed away into appropriate folders. I decided to pull up Notes on my iBook just now, and clear out the rest of my stuff. I have now achieved an empty inbox, for probably the first time since 1997, when we first installed a Notes server. Yay!

I did a pretty good weekly review today too. Probably closer to an ideal weekly review than I’ve done before, but still not quite what I should be doing.

On an unrelated topic, I picked up the Heroes season one DVD set today at Target. I was trying to resist it, since I already have all the episodes on my computer via iTunes, but Target had a special edition set with four notecards illustrated by Tim Sale, and I’m a sucker for Tim Sale stuff.

Post 1000

Well, this should be the thousandth post on my blog. I don’t have anything particularly interesting to say about this. Here are a few totally uninteresting things going on in my life right now:

  • I’m just getting over a cold that I caught over the Labor Day weekend.
  • I’m down to just 51 messages in my Notes inbox. I like to think I’m doing a pretty good job of organizing my stuff into projects, actions, and reference material. And I’m deleting a lot more than I used to.
  • Football season starts today!
  • I’m currently reading Neil Gaiman’s InterWorld and the third volume of Dark Horse’s Conan reprints.

I’ve been using Blogger for this thing since 2001, and it’s always worked well for me, aside from an occasional hiccup. I’m kind of surprised that I’ve kept it up for so long, but I’ve never completely lost interest in it. I don’t know if anyone else has ever gotten anything out of this blog, but it’s helped me out on several occasions. It’s useful for me to be able to go back and see what I’ve been thinking and doing in the past; what I’ve been reading and listening to; what I’ve been working on. It helps out a lot when I’m trying to do what David Allen would call a 30,000+ ft review.

Heroes on Amazon

According to this article, new episodes of Heroes will be available on Amazon Unbox rather than iTunes this season. I bought the first season from iTunes, and I might find myself looking to buy digital versions of the show this year, too. It’s nice that they didn’t shoot themselves in the foot and choose not to offer it at all, which is what it was starting to look like after the iTunes thing fell through last week. I’ve rented a few movies from Unbox (downloaded to my TiVo) and the quality is OK. I imagine the quality on Heroes would be similar to the iTunes quality. It’s kind of annoying that Unbox doesn’t work on Macs though, so I wouldn’t be able to watch Heroes on my Mac if I got it from Unbox.

blog changes

Not that anyone’s going to be that interested in this, but I made a couple of changes to the sidebar on this blog today. First, I removed the Technorati and Spurl widgets. I guess I never really figured out what the point of Technorati was, and the little widget I had on the side didn’t seem to serve much of a purpose.

Spurl, on the other hand, is a great web-based bookmark manager. Unfortunately, it appears to be a zombie site at this point; it’s still up and running, but at reduced functionality, and, looking at their user forums, it doesn’t appear that anyone’s minding the shop — there’s nothing but link spam in the forums right now. I’m still using Spurl, but I’m thinking about dropping it, since it’s probably going to disappear at some point. (I have a mental image of Spurl running on a server in a closet somewhere that everyone’s just forgotten about. At some point, the hard drive will die, or someone will find it and unplug it, and that’ll be the end of that.)

I’ve replaced the Spurl widget with a del.icio.us linkroll. I think that’s a little more representative of what I’m bookmarking lately.

And I reformatted the tag list. It used to be a bulleted list. Now it’s just the keywords separated by slashes. I just wanted to make it more compact, so you could see it all together easily.